Interesting thought, personally I think holding the phone (or a radio) to your ear is a distraction from the road, hands free is a better idea, but here they want to ban that as well. Using your argument, that would mean that you can't have a passenger in your car because talking to them is a distraction. Even worse, you shouldn't have a screaming baby in the car that's an even bigger distraction, the kids should drive themselves.

I'm obviously just having a dig at the stupidity of it all, but has anyone ever stopped to think how dangerous menu driven entertainment systems are? I think the only controls that should be enabled while the car is in motion are actual knobs and buttons that effect a direct function. Otherwise saying you can't dial a number or check a message is just rubbish.

Artists need to be motivated to come up with new great stuff. We can't expect to listen beautiful music for free. However, from here and until putting an FM radio in every single cell phone is a long road. People who really want to listen to the radio install new cell phone accessories on their mobiles and they are free to choose the FM they like. That's how things should be.

Totally crazy to mandate it, that sort of thing should be driven by user demand. I had a phone once that had a radio built in and thought that's neat, won't have to carry my portable radio, but in the end my portable would run 2 weeks on an AAA cell and the phone had to be charged every 3 days, so I stuck to the radio. Also in Oz they're going the DAB+ route so all those FM radio's will be dead. Finally If they want us to listen to radio they should put more of what we want to listen to, not less, else I'll just go over to listening to the 4,000+ MP3 files I've made from my CD's and not have to listen to 20 commercials to get one song.

That raised good point, if I have not connected headset will emergency radio work? If not whats the point in mandating it. Moreover my cell phone being controlled by someone else and turn on radio when I am not expecting... I would certainly not like that.

The excuse of placing FM receivers in Cell phones is weak at best as the "Go To" channels for everything from natuarl disasters to amber alerts is the weather alert frequency in your area. It would not be to much to program the limited number of frequencies into a location database or even have have the tower switch the handset to local emergency channel.
Mandating FM radios in cell phones is only for the good of the recording & music industries, and involving a disinterested third market is ludicrous.

The music industry is asking for a quid with no pro quo. FM on cell phones will become marketing driven. Whether used or not, good marketers will make it a selling point and other manufacturers will be forced to adopt.
Meanwhile, the NAB is agreeing to a tax on stations to pay performers. No, wait! It's not performers. The money will go to the labels. Doesn't matter that most of it will leave the country. Doesn't matter that, once the labels "filter" it, little will get to performers. Doesn't matter that the real reason music sales are down isn't piracy (something radio doesn't contribute to) but that the problem is that the labels are releasing garbage. Doesn't matter that stations, with over 90% of them having 12 or fewer employees, will have to cut one job each (that's about 16,000 American voters put out of work).
...and what the labels and performers are too myopic to see is that Clearchannel and others, with their "tagging" may well be able to track EXACTLY who's performing well...and quit playing those that aren't. Then (insert talent name here) how ya gonna get your latest piece of junk sampled.

In jurisdictions where driving while talking on a hand held cell phone is illegal, will it be legal to listen to FM radio on a hand held cell phone while driving? (It really should be, if holding a pocket radio up to the ear is legal.) If so, will the traffic cop buy the excuse that the driver was listening to radio instead of engaging in a phone conversation, especially after the driver demonstrates that the phone is tuned to a radio station?

I can't think of a worse possible thing to do in a security scenario than what you describe as "making it ON remotely". Congratulations, that person who was successfully hiding from the shooter as quietly as they could possibly be, just had their location given away by their cell phone suddenly coming out of silent mode and squawking a warning. At which point the gunman realized there was a live witness nearby. Do you really want that innocent blood on your conscience? FM radio does NOTHING with emergency announcements that a text message wouldn't do better and more safely.

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.